Re: Back to basics - or musings of an old bore

[bfarnell@xxxxxxx]

Adam McLean wrote:
> 
> It seems to me that many of the skilled cryptographers on
> this group have puzzled and worked over the Voynich now
> for many years and yet seem no nearer to cracking the code.
> 
> It also seems unlikely to me that someone in the 16th
> century could devise a code that could defeat 21st
> century methods.
> 
> But how else can we proceed ?
> 
 
For what it's worth:

An interesting sideline for the bored or frustrated that still wanted to
play might be to try a reverse approach.  Basically, take the abilities,
resources and requirements of a 16th century writer and try to generate
some codes previously not documented.  Perhaps the results might yield
some new insight into possible encryption methods.  Perhaps it would
yield nothing, but for the bored, trying to beat Bacon and Trithemius at
the encryption game would be an amusing past time with the possibility
of being applicable.  Actually, just the act of manually encrypting
something may yield insight.  I once made an enciphered German based on
simple substitution (I was a kid).  Being lazy, I quickly decided that
'ei' and 'ie' ought to have their own letter and that all of the
articles (indefinite and definite) over all genders and cases could be
represented by a single symbol without losing hardly any data (on the
assumption that it would be I alone reading back what I wrote, so there
would be little ambiguity on my own work).  These things are both
possibilities for the VMS and even me as a 10 year old came up with them
out of necessity.  Perhaps playing this way might yield some good
results as a consequence of 'parallel evolution'.

Regards,
Brian